PEOPLE
March 16, 2025
Cold cases and true crime captivate us because they leave behind a void, begging to be filled with narrative. When we don’t have answers, we create stories to help us understand. It’s part of what it means to be human—to try and make sense of the senseless, to find meaning in the inexplicable.
My novels have often been inspired by lost-to-time stories, ones that linger in the spaces between fact and fiction. But for The Story She Left Behind, the tale came without answers.
Born in 1914, Barbara Newhall Follett was a prodigious literary talent. By the age of three, she was consumed with letters and their patterns, with the musical sound of a typewriter. The opening lines of a story she wrote when she was six years old began, “Once upon a time, though I can’t say exactly when…” and the words never stopped, the stories formed in her wild imagination.